The Habitable Zone

Elisa Quintana, Kepler research scientist at the SETI Intitute and NASA Ames, was kind enough to give a lecture to the Charlottesville Astronomical Society (CAS) last night via Skype. The topic was Kepler-186f and exoplanet research, specifically the effort to look for Earth-sized planets in a star’s “habitable zone” — the area around a star that is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist.

Although I haven’t historically been all that interested in exoplanets, hearing about TESS during my recent visit to NASA Goddard, and last night’s lecture have piqued my interest a bit.